good alternative is to use the RichEdit control. The RichEdit control is actually capable of displaying text almost as nicely formatted as an HTML engine. It is also relatively light-weight, although it also supports a COM object model and various printing facilities.
Unfortunately, the RichEdit control requires Rich Text Formatted (RTF) text, which is a lot more difficult to master than HTML.
So I build a simple HTML to RTF converter, which knows of basic text formatting, tables and layout. I also extended a RichEdit text control with a Load(HTML) method, added the converter to transform the HTML input into RTF and Presto: Enter the Simple HTML Viewer control!
This new control is a regular RichEdit control, but one that accepts HTML as input. It renders the text as close as possible to the Internet Explorer browser - allowing you to have a variety of text formatting styles with a light-weight text control
